On Sat, Jul 01, 2006 at 05:40:19PM +0100, Kevin Broadfoot wrote:
> The facts of a real case involving Sussex Police and the Commissioner's
> decision notice may helpful: see
> www.ico.gov.uk/cms/DocumentUploads/Decision_Notice_FS50099691.pdf
This is a rather strange decision. The key element here seems to be that
the volume of requests from this person would impose too much collective
expense on a range of public authorities. This is pet bugbear of mine
as if government published more information more readily then these
costs would mostly vanish. By this argument government is rewarded by
hiding information as well as possible so that it will cost too much
money to retrieve, which rather goes against the principle of FoI.
Moreover, the decision seems to find it rather difficult to explain why
this is actually sufficient ground to refuse the request. It pretty much
explicitly states that no reason could be found in the legislation itself,
so they had to consider the law in other countries.
This seems like a bad decision to me, and it will be interesting to
see if it's appealed. It would certainly seem to me that if any other
person made the identical request to the same authority it would have
to be answered, which to me makes the decision unsafe.
On the issue of the name, per se, it does however say:
The identity and motives of a requester are unlikely to render a request
vexatious.
Tony
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
All archives of messages are stored permanently and are
available to the world wide web community at large at
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/data-protection.html
If you wish to leave this list please send the command
leave data-protection to [log in to unmask]
All user commands can be found at : -
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/help/commandref.htm
Any queries about sending or receiving message please send to the list owner
[log in to unmask]
(all commands go to [log in to unmask] not the list please)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
|